Data Scientist at Textile, Assistant Professor at University of Colorado Boulder

Jul 23

Summer 2018 Community Update

As the dog days of summer approach, we thought it would be a good time to update our community members, early testers/adopters, and friends on what we’ve been up to the last quarter. And what a quarter it has been! We’ve been busy building, interacting with the community, developing training materials, and a whole lot more. The following is a brief roundup of recent activities and outputs. If you’d like to hear more about any of these activities, please don’t hesitate to reach out, we’d be happy to elaborate!

Decentralized Web Summit and a Free Giveaway

We are extremely excited to be joining the awesome decentralized web community at the Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco next week. We will be giving a lightning talk session about Textile Photos and building on IPFS. We’ll also be running a live, collaborative experiment with Textile Photos decentralized photo sharing on IPFS!

If you are at the summit, be sure to take part in the #DWebSummit photo sharing fun. Also, be sure to get in touch with Andrew or Sander and find a time to connect!

Free #DWebSummit Tickets!

Speaking of the #DWebSummit… last week, we announced that Textile is sponsoring three student tickets to the DWeb Summit. That call is still open, so if you are a student and want to attend the DWeb Summit this year, get in touch asap! We especially encourage applications from women and/or underrepresented community members, and these applications will be given priority. Students with greater financial need will also be given preference. So don’t be shy. This is a great opportunity to interact with (and be) the builders of the future decentralized web.

Textile was at the IPFS Developer Conference

Textile team members Andrew Hill and Sander Pick joined the IPFS Developer’s Conference in Berlin earlier this month, and the energy and excitement at the conference was through the roof. If you’ve ever wondered what is possible when you combine incredible talent with an incredible culture, just take a look at the IPFS, libp2p, Filecoin and Protocol Labs teams. Textile Photos uses IPFS to decentralized both our media transfer and our p2p communication, so we couldn’t be more excited by all the things we saw in Berlin.

If you are a developer focused on IPFS or decentralization more generally, you should join the IPFS 2018 event in Lisbon this November. Be sure to drop us a line so we can meet in person!

Launch of Textile Build

Last month, we launched a new training initiative we’re calling Textile Build, a free online workshop series covering everything you need to know to start building for the decentralized web. The course is designed to provide a working understanding of the decentralized web in general, and the specific tools and technologies needed to interact with IPFS more specifically. We already have more than 150 builders signed up, and the list continues to grow! You can sign up here. We also launched a survey to help us optimize course content, which you can fill out here.

To make it easier for as many people as possible to participate in the live training sessions, we will be running the live sessions at 9AM PST (16:00 GMT) each day (Jul 31st, Aug 2nd, 7th, 9th, and 14th). We will also be hosting live office hours at 6PM PST (1:00 GMT) on Slack (join the #build channel), which you can also use for ‘off hours’ questions. The live sessions will run on YouTube Live, and the recordings will be made available shortly thereafter. Live links to the sessions will be shared closer to the 31st, so stay tuned!

Building the Developer Community

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that we have ramped up our blogging and community outreach activities. We have been focusing really hard on providing quality content to help foster greater adoption of distributed web tech (and we’re now turning some of this content into material for our Textile Build series). It has been an extremely fun and rewarding experience, and the IPFS community has been hugely helpful and supportive. We’ve even been featured on Hackernoon and freeCodeCamp! We will continue to develop and provide content in the form of tutorials, demos, how-tos, and much more. If you’d like to make a request, suggestion, or just generally chat, feel free to get in touch! In the mean time, here are a few highlights from the past few weeks:

Hard at Work

We’ve also been hard at work on our core product, Textile Photos. We are extremely exited with what we have built in such a short amount of time. You can follow our progress over on GitHub, and if you want to contribute issues, pull requests, or comment on implementations, please feel free… we love open source! We’ve also teamed up with Sans Bureau to develop a beautiful and engaging user experience that we think folks are going to love! Some of these screens and updates will be ready in time for DWebSummit, so be sure to keep an eye out! We are also slowly moving through our wait-list (it’s getting longer every day!), so if you are still waiting for your referral code, we promise we are making our way through the list, and your code is coming soon 😃. In the mean time, here’s a sneak peak at an upcoming feature from Sander: